ABSTRACT
Early discussions of Heidegger’s philosophy relating to translation tended to focus on the difficulty, even the purported impossibility, of translating his philosophical idiom. More recently discussion has focused increasingly on Heidegger’s own translation practice, the integral part that translation played in his understanding of philosophy and thought itself, together with the thematic discussions of translation that are dispersed throughout his writings. This chapter is divided into three parts. Part 1 discusses the radical rethinking of hermeneutics that the young Heidegger developed as the central feature of his development of phenomenology into a hermeneutic ontology. This radical hermeneutic approach involves the temporalising enactment of the hermeneutic situation as the basis of understanding as such. Heidegger thus understands the truism that all translation is interpretation in a specific way. I show this radical hermeneutic translation at work in Heidegger’s early lectures on Aristotle and compare and contrast it with accepted notions of context dependence. Part 2 looks at the role that ‘fundamental words’ play in Heidegger’s thinking and translation. Heidegger’s translations unfold from a repeated reinterpretation of these fundamental words from Greek thinkers and poets, most prominently aletheia, logos, phusis as words that name the self-showing of phenomena and his own fundamental words that pose specific difficulties for translators, most prominently Dasein, Ereignis and Gestell. I explore possible justifications and potential limitations of this focus on fundamental words in Heidegger’s developing thinking of language and explore two cases of his attempts to translate deinon and agxibasiē as illustrative of this potential. Part 3 gives a brief overview of the history of English language discussions of Heidegger’s views on translation and how they have developed as more of his work has been published and understanding of his philosophy has changed. I show how these discussions have fed in to recent disputes about how to translate Heidegger’s work into English, distilled in the two extant translations of the significant middle period manuscript Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) and Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event. At least some features of these disputes seem to result from precisely the essential tensions in thought that Heidegger brought to the fore, and it seems that we should try to welcome repeated translation as the continuation of the thought that Heidegger initiated.
